Wartime hardened British attitudes to the prisoners as well. Gandhi ‘should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting’, Churchill told the Cabinet. ‘We should be rid of a bad man and...
Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely...
Tolerance, after all, implies that you have the truth, but will generously indulge another who does not; you will, in an act of tolerance, allow him the right to be wrong. Acceptance, on the other han...
The task of dividing the two nations was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India before and knew nothing of its history, society or traditions. Radcliffe drew up his maps...
The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legisl...
The naval expansionism of the southern Chola and Pallava empires took Indian influences directly to Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and Cambodia. Later,
The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party,
The historian A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre ‘the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule’. No other ‘punishment’ in the name of law and order had similar casualties: ‘The...
The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking...
The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels...
The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a...
The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, ‘united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.’ Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuildin...
The British used the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ to refer to British people living and working in India, and ‘Eurasian’ to refer to those of mixed parentage, usually the children of lower-ranking Europeans an...
The Atharva Veda points out that the quest for awareness, the search for answers, the journey towards self-realization, never ceases: How does the wind not cease to blow?How does the mind take no repo...
My friend Keerthik Sasidharan suggested to me, in twenty-first-century terms, that Hinduism is analogous to an open-source operating system on top of which others can build applications to be deployed...
Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’.
History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.
Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others.
Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.
As I was typing this last sentence, somewhat hastily, my computer’s spellcheck offered ‘Brutish’ as an acceptable substitute for ‘British’ rule in India!